Opening for Green Day at Verizon Arena on Wednesday night is Gainesville, Fla.-based punk ragers Against Me!
Fronted by Laura Jane Grace, a transgender woman formerly known as Tom Gabel, the band's latest album is Shape Shift With Me.
Grace, who started the band in 1997 as a solo acoustic act before expanding to a proper group, has been the sole constant member of the project. Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose from 2002 was the band's first full-length album.
In 2007, the group signed to major label Sire Records and put out New Wave, which was produced by Butch Vig and featured the fist-pumping single "Thrash Unreal." White Crosses followed in 2010.
In 2012, Grace came out as transgender and in 2014 the band dropped the energetic and defiant Transgender Dysphoria Blues, in which Grace, who had previously only hinted in her music at her feelings of alienation and confusion, confronted those issues and others in tracks like the blazing title song, "True Trans Soul Rebel" and "Drinking With the Jocks."
Her memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, based on journals she'd kept since third grade, was released in November.
-- Sean Clancy
Style on 03/07/2017